The sudden and unwanted emigration wrenched me from calm and comfortable life of a middle-aged architect into the one of an exile in a new land. In these times, I turned to photography as a way of holding my family together, of inventing meaning where certainty was gone.

I began constructing a private, fairy-tale world hidden from prying eyes, which only my two daughters have access to. The world where the boundaries of possibility dissolve, the feminine fantasyland sprung from the bedtime tales mothers weave for their children.

In our fantasyland, nothing is permanent. Everything shifts, transforms. Mother, witch, queen; daughter-girl, daughter-child, daughter-doll—each character blending into the next, caught in a constant state of transformation. There is no fixed point, only the shimmering transitions between them. And no end here, even a happy one. The darkness of the outer, unfriendly, foreign world gathers at the edges of each image, yet it cannot extinguish the light we create ourselves.

The three of us transform through European folktales archetypes, haunted, mystical, grotesque, yet the characters and scenes do not replicate any existing stories, our fairytale is still untold.

This work is my means of coping with the despondency and fear of emigration. It is also a opportunity to share play with my daughters and leave them with lasting memories of the time we spent together during this difficult chapter of our lives. This is one of the ways of being a woman and a mother in a quickly collapsing world.

"We are proud to present the Diploma Award to Mari Saxon, whose staged photography evokes a haunting visual narrative that oscillates between memory, performance, and inner myth.

Her series immerses us in carefully constructed domestic scenes where the theatrical and the surreal coexist. Through uncanny juxtapositions of body parts, ritual-like gestures, and painterly lighting, the photographs explore female identity, vulnerability, and the blurred line between reality and dream.

Thank you, Mari, for turning interiors into spaces of tension, transformation, and visual poetry."

____________________________________________________________________________________ Phodar Biennial